Twenty Key Challenges in Environmental and Resource Economics
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Twenty Key Challenges in Environmental and Resource Economics Lucas Bretschger1 · Karen Pittel2 Accepted: 5 October 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Economic and ecological systems are closely interlinked at a global and a regional level, offering a broad variety of important research topics in environmental and resource economics. The successful identification of key challenges for current and future research supports development of novel theories, empirical applications, and appropriate policy designs. It allows establishing a future-oriented research agenda whose ultimate goal is an efficient, equitable, and sustainable use of natural resources. Based on a normative foundation, the paper aims to identify fundamental topics, current trends, and major research gaps to motivate further development of academic work in the field. Keywords Environmental and resource economics · Survey · Key research topics JEL Classification Q00 · Q2 · Q3 · Q5
1 Introduction 1.1 Research Frontier The research agenda in environmental and resource economics has always been very broad and dynamic, reflecting the ways our economies interact with the natural environment. While in classical economics of the eighteenth century the factor land played a dominant role, the effects of pollution externalities, resource scarcities, ecosystem services, and sustainability became important in subsequent time periods. These issues have triggered different waves of research with very prominent results, specifically on optimal policies in the presence of externalities (Pigou 1920), optimal extraction of non-renewable resources (Hotelling 1931), optimal capital accumulation in the presence of resource scarcities
* Lucas Bretschger [email protected] Karen Pittel [email protected] 1
CER-ETH Centre of Economic Research at ETH Zurich, ZUE F7, 8092 Zurich, Switzerland
2
ifo Center for Energy, Climate and Resources, ifo Institute and LMU Munich, Munich, Germany
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(Dasgupta and Heal 1974), and sustainable development (Hartwick 1977; Pearce et al. 1994). Of course, the list of topics has already been very diverse in the past but has increasingly become so with recent global environmental problems challenging the functioning of a world economy which is growing at a high rate and heavily relies on an international division of labour and trade. In the past, new research challenges emerged and manifested in different ways: Some topical fields became increasingly relevant due to new technological developments, new ecological or societal challenges or new political agendas. Others arose in fields that were already well researched but rose in importance. Not all challenges were of a topical nature. In some fields, we found our methodological tool-kit not equipped to deal with new problems or in need of extension to find new (and better) answers to old questions. At the same time, it has become increasingly clear that we have to reach out to other disciplines to meet new and often immense challenges. In env
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